The JD-800 is Roland's answer to half a decade of hard-to-program synthesizers. Covered in sliders that act as dedicated editors just like a classic analog synth, the JD-800 is an extremely programmable and hands-on digital synthesizer. It is also an interesting and great sounding digital synth with incredible flexibility and control. Internal ROM based waveforms are combined to build your sounds. The sounds are based on Roland's D-50, but updated for the nineties with multimode filters - uncommon but welcome at the time.

The JD-800 came in a tough metal case capped off on the sides with large plastic covers. Programming may be a little too flexible for some users, but once you know what you're doing with it, almost any sound you can dream up can be dialed in and stored.

It has been used by William Ørbit, Emerson Lake & Palmer, 808 State, Ken Ishii, Astral Projection, Rabbit in the Moon, Depeche Mode, Underworld, Tangerine Dream, LTJ Bukem, Apollo 440, Jean Michel Jarre, ATB, Vangelis, Pet Shop Boys, Faithless, Luke Vibert, Mouse on Mars, Laurent Garnier, MC Hammer, Bushflange, Genesis, and Eat Static.

f a

April 26, 2012 @ 3:51 pm

Overrated synth. I had one and thought the sound was weak. Nothing special about this board, no matter how you program it. It lacks character. Thought the D70 sounded better,which I thought was boring as well. Don't get me wrong, I do like some Roland gear. I've had an MKS50, D550 and have an MKS70 which are great synths. Anyway, I sold this board. Low and behold when it arrived to the buyer,it didn't power up. Because of the warm weather, the epoxy glue that is part of the keybed oozed all over the place causing the problem.I'll never own one again.

caramel prisoner

April 24, 2012 @ 2:44 pm

programmers dream. I can spend hours on this. lush, complex, sophisticated and darth-vader-looks.

king of cool :)

Christian Morency

April 10, 2012 @ 8:09 am

I just released a JD-VST patch editor for JD-800 and JD-990... in beta-test more info here:

[url]http://ctrlr.org/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=858&start=257[/url]

[img] http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4540586/ctrlr/preview-3.png[/img]

nick.ncp

March 24, 2012 @ 6:00 am

imposing thing this, could hardly believe my eyes when I got it delivered. much larger than I expected. so make sure you have some space before you get one.

still in discovery-phase, but for sure it has immense power and authority. also like the function to set the tune of a note over time with sliders (the ones centrally on top), never seen this before but it is actually quite useful.

low-end in the mix is just enormous and needs to be controlled a bit. this thing seems to churn out low frequencies in buckets..

VCO8

March 10, 2012 @ 3:50 pm

Tony Banks of Genesis used this synth live in 1992 and replaced his Synclavier

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